Answer: “The provision of integrated, accessible health care services by clinicians who are accountable for addressing a large majority of personal health care needs, developing a sustained partnership with patients, and practicing in the context of family and community.”

As the year winds down, I’ve been reflecting on my time here, beginning with my favorite class.

Started this year by the Harvard Primary Care Center and Primary Care Progress, the Primary Care Innovation Collaborative (PCIC) is a nonconventional class that’s technically not part of the first-year curriculum. But it probably should be because I’ve gotten more out of it than all my other classes combined.

How does PCIC work? The class pairs you up with a primary care mentor and allows you to devise and work on a project together. Once a month, all the PCIC students and mentors get together for a workshop that focuses on topics ranging from process mapping to leadership in clinical innovation. More importantly, the workshops divide students and mentors into small groups and give them time to share and get feedback from each other about their projects. Even more importantly, we get free pizza from Bertuccis. None of that Il Mundo stuff. This is high quality pizza.

Aside from pizza, I want to share 3 main things that I value and appreciate about PCIC.
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I may be biased, but I think that Caribbean medical schools hold the key to our primary care crisis in the United States. As a recent graduate of the Aureus University School of Medicine in Aruba, I am part of a growing trend of individuals who attend medical school in the Caribbean. Students are attending these schools, as well as osteopathic schools because traditional U.S.-based medical schools have been unable to accommodate all qualified individuals who want to become doctors.

We know that primary care is vital to the health of American citizens, but we have a shortage of medical graduates going into primary care—a key barrier to health care access for these citizens. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the shortage will reach 130,800 physicians by 2025.
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Results of a new survey have found that primary care doctors, despite making less than half the median salary of some specialists, aren’t the only doctors who feel underpaid. This is according to Medscape’s latest Physician Compensation Report. In February, the organization sent an online survey to 455,000 physicians in the United States and collected results from nearly 16,000 doctors in 22 specialties. These results provide insight into the challenges that we face in improving primary care in America.
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